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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27784021">Hand-Me-Down Words</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon'>ForASecondThereWedWon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Oh my god, they were checkmates... [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Queen's Gambit (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Getting Back Together, Living Together, Past Drug Addiction, Past Gambling Addiction, Post-Canon, Romantic Gestures, Sexual Tension, The Queen's Gambit 2: Lost in New York, Writing, book deal, if anything they've FOUND each other again, jk no one's lost, yeah alright I'll stop</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 01:00:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,639</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27784021</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A publisher wants to print the Beth Harmon story, but Beth doesn't know how to go about writing a book. Luckily, she knows someone who does.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beth Harmon/Benny Watts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Oh my god, they were checkmates... [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020483</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>411</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hand-Me-Down Words</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><i>All the secondhand words seem to get in my way/I want to hear it from you</i> - Gordon Lightfoot</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They want her to write a book. With triumph over Borgov behind her, Beth requires a new challenge, and with the payout from Moscow, she doesn’t need to enter any American tournaments for the time being. Tedious car journeys and rough hotel sheets combined in trips that end in prizes of piddly amounts aren’t in her future unless she wants them to be. Victory means control. <em>Writing</em>, writing should mean control too.</p><p>Except that Beth’s never done anything like this before.</p><p>Numbers are the Harmon language—hers and her mother’s. Expressions, equations, calculations, and chess. Even Alma made sense of life through budgeting. Beth’s first thought after meeting with the agent she selected to represent her and the acquisitions editor at the publishing house is, <em>Thank god I’m already in New York</em>, because she needs help here. She needs somebody who’s done this before.</p><p>Unsure how quickly or if they’ll fall into their old pattern of sharing the bed, Beth informs Benny that she’s buying him a couch. A couch which will really be for her. She rejects even the remotest possibility that she’ll ever again sleep on that stupid inflatable mattress, pretending not to get a cramp in either her calf or the arch of her foot (or both) when she had to work the damn pump every night to avoid his gloating smile, to perpetuate his mistaken understanding of it being a situation of him providing her with something instead of the opposite. She maintains that he did promise a couch and is therefore a boldfaced liar. Which she should have seen because, liar? Yes, of course. The man plays chess for a living. A face that can alternately frighten and reassure an onlooker is a necessity. <em>Come stay with me at my apartment in New York while we’re both aware of your attraction to me</em>. Frightening. <em>Don’t worry, you’ll sleep on the couch and this arrangement will keep things platonic and focused on your chess training</em>. Reassuring.</p><p>“I’m buying a couch for your living room.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Well, fuck him. Beth leapfrogs her original scheme and buys an entire apartment. Not a <em>nice</em> one—she still has the Lexington house to caretake and eventually reinhabit—but it is above ground. She insists it’s hers, a good investment, a base in New York for all of her future meetings with her agent and editor, until Benny gives her a look that has her raising her palms and halting her excuses. She never asks him to give up his place. When he walks into hers one day with the key she had made for him dangling from his finger and a box of possessions under his arm, she just scrapes her chair back from the table and shows him the space she left for him in the closet.</p><p>She thinks they might have sex the day she comes back from a publicity event (they’re drumming it up before she’s written a single coherent page) to find Benny napping on the couch with his hat over his face like a cowboy, instinctively pulling her close when she knocks it away and startles him awake. Or when he suggests that she begin carrying a knife too and jokingly taps her thigh when she asks where she’s supposed to conceal it. Or when he stumbles blearily into her room in the early morning because she’s crying tears of frustration over her typewriter and he wordlessly gathers her into a sleep-warmed embrace. Or when they quit acting like he’s a guest and he calls it “our apartment” for the first time.</p><p>Beth wants to charge through the book. She’ll write for hours at a time, answering questions only as they occur to her, the way she’s danced back and forth with her true competitors on the chessboard. But Benny has the wisdom of a published author here and ruthlessly edits these pages—<em>verbally</em>, never picking up a pencil. He pushes her to compose the questions ahead of time, allowing her to address them with equal weight. Also, to come up with certain themes or trains of thought that are vital to the forward energy of the book and capture the spirit of her play, which is really what she’s made this deal in order to describe. People are hungry to see chess through her eyes. They’ll pay good money for it.</p><p>Whenever they’re on the brink of an argument because Beth is hammering away at the typewriter while Benny’s trying to get to sleep, or Benny is being as pushy and transactional as her editor while Beth’s desperate for a little encouragement, one of them inevitably suggests a match.</p><p>Playing at home is helping to break his habit of wagering on games. She never says anything directly; progress seems to come more easily for him when he doesn’t feel watched, which she gets, from having people voice their concern over the tranquilizers. It’s been… well, since the night she decimated him and his friends at speed chess, that he thought he had a failproof method for beating her. He can’t afford to lose every game—he has to contribute to the household finances.</p><p>They play three games at once, on three separate boards. They play without a board, swapping moves as they eat lunch and people-watch on a park bench. They play blindfolded until they get into a fight because Beth isn’t familiar with the shape of one of his sets and thinks she’s been moving a bishop when her fingers really stuttered over the pieces to land on a pawn. (They remove the blindfolds after checkmate to see that pawn ‘checking’ the king from a diagonal across the board and Benny discounts the entire match as illegal.)</p><p>They play games that last a day or more, leaving notepads beside the board like they do at tournaments and checking each other’s over the hours for new moves before responding with slides and taps and exchanges of their own. During one of these, when Benny’s been taking forever to take his turn (because Beth has him pinned and he’s being stubborn about conceding), she comes into the kitchen to start dinner and sees him sitting at the table, staring at the board, <em>still</em> not making a move.</p><p>“You can get out of it,” she comments, standing next to his chair with her arms folded. She doesn’t really believe that and he knows it; she watches him shift irritably in his seat.</p><p>“I think I would’ve done it by now.”</p><p>His refusal to even <em>try</em> while she’s standing there watching (yes, she still loves to watch him play) makes her just as determined to beat her own white pieces back as she was formerly determined to beat him. She studies the board harder and it does take several minutes. Finally, she spots the move.</p><p>Without thinking, Beth drops down onto his lap and says, “Here,” as she reaches out and drags the king onto a new square. “It looks like an exposed placement, but it’s really the perfect bait to get white to rearrange its offensive, opening things up for a comeback by black. See?”</p><p>She turns her head and her heart swoops as Benny’s gaze strokes unhurriedly up her neck to her face. He blinks twice, quickly, like seeing her here is a surprise and a dream. Gently, he shifts her hips back a little, until she can feel the firmness at his groin. He stops sleeping on the couch.</p><p>With trimming and factchecking and too much coffee, her book is suddenly in its final draft, pressed back into her hands by the editor who’s probably really, <em>really</em> tired of reading about chess. Regardless, the woman still loves the book. Vibrantly, aggressively. The house’s whole staff does, the way they can only love something they’re publishing in a frenzy, before interest in the young female champion wanes. Beth is amazed to find that she loves it too. It has a lot of heart, she feels, between the numbers that have defined her career; though it isn’t one of the sections she’s been requested to rejig for this last edit, she finds herself flipping back to a page near the beginning, where she writes about going to her first tournament unrated. Though journalists have always been curious about the morbidity of the car crash and her orphanage upbringing, she doesn’t give up too much of that. The highs and lows of Methuen—Jolene’s resilience and the green pills’ quicksand—will go unprinted. Readers will have to search for the personal. It’s in the brimming praise of Mr. Shaibel that Beth fought to include, and the passages of effusive respect for Alma, who learned to both manage and mother her.</p><p>It’s in the dedication.</p><p>Beth carries a copy home from the first box of the first printing. For the moment, it’s precious, but soon those boxes will be shipped out to bookstores, where employees will stack and shelve and shoppers will recognize her name on the spine and go, “Oh, isn’t she the one who…?” She smiles to imagine it.</p><p>“Benny?” she calls into their apartment. “You home?”</p><p>She curls around him from behind when he raises a hand from the couch. He’s reading but he puts the book down to transfer his complete attention to her and she kisses him with her mouth so full of the delight of her accomplishment that they almost get carried away. Breathless, she draws back, then hands her work over. She watches eagerly as Benny turns the pages, stopping him before the introduction.</p><p>His name isn’t the only one on the list—compiling people worth dedicating her book to was an exercise in recognizing the luck of her life—but it is the last. The endgame.</p><p><em>…and to Benny</em>, it reads. <em>Let’s set it up. Let’s think it out.</em></p>
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